


Sisyphus

by ChaosMidge (NotQuiteInsane)



Series: Wilde Week 2020 [1]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: A Wilde Week 2020 (Rusty Quill Gaming), Angst, Betrayal, Feelings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27600644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteInsane/pseuds/ChaosMidge
Summary: Day 1 - “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."Forgiveness|  Revenge  |ApathyThe betrayal had hit Wilde the hardest.But perhaps not in the way that they thought.
Relationships: Zolf Smith & Oscar Wilde
Series: Wilde Week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020070
Comments: 16
Kudos: 27
Collections: A Wilde Week 2020





	Sisyphus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [makesometime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/makesometime/gifts).



> Me before Wilde Week: Nahhhh I can't write to prompts.  
> Me on Day One of Wilde Week: TIME TO SPEED WRITE.  
> It's ten minutes before midnight, let me live.
> 
> No Beta. Barely edited. All mistakes are my own.  
> Thank you friends, Romans, countrynerds.  
> (And thank you Oscar Wilde.)

It was bad. None of them could deny it.

The betrayal was bad.

It hurt them all in different ways, that knife in the dark.

Zolf had been desperate to keep his companions alive, safe, and protected, but he'd failed. The blow had cut deeper than he cared to admit. But he focused all his energy on the future, on patching things up and making sure that this could never happen again.

Barnes had felt guilt. Guilt at not recognizing what was going to happen before it did. Guilt at bringing the contact so close to their safe house in the first place. Guilt at not throwing himself in front of the blade as it descended. He could have done it if he'd only been more vigilant, kept to his training, not been blinded by pride.

Carter hadn't been there and felt regret most keenly. Keeping a weather eye out was his job, spotting deception and cunning in their marks, leveraging his boundless energy on the particular task of sussing out the motivations of others. But he'd been away. He'd been off on another assignment and unable to do what he considered his most important job.

Wilde...

The betrayal had hit Wilde the hardest.

But perhaps not in the way that they thought.

Zolf watched in silence as Oscar Wilde took a bowl from the cupboard and filled it with that night's supper—a hearty broth to ward off the chill of outside, the storm that had been raging for days and beat against the wooden walls of their current hideout.

His movements were slow, decisive, belying none of the shakes that Zolf knew plagued the man when he thought no one was looking. The shakes that no amount of healing had yet been able to cure.

"That all you're taking, Oscar?"

The bard glanced up at him and then back down at the two meager dumplings he'd ladled out of the soup. "Yes, I quite think my appetite will be satisfied with that. Your cooking is always a marvel. Really, Zolf, I don't know how you do it." He tried to flash a smile at the dwarf, but the skin on the right side of his face stretched uncomfortably, red, puckered skin not moving as it should.

He stopped, smile frozen in that half-grimace, and looked back down at the bowl in his hands.

Zolf watched as the man stared into his food.

Watched as the thoughts left his head and an unfamiliar blankness settled over his face.

The place behind Zolf's sternum twisted and slowly sank to his stomach, leaving an ugly, tainted thing behind that he couldn't—or didn't want—to name.

Wilde's grip tightened on the bowl and he excused himself with a quiet word.

The next time Zolf saw Wilde was when he went to ask about the progress of their current mission. It was only in the planning stages, but they'd gotten enough information in the wake of...

They'd gotten enough information.

It should have been enough to have them well on their way to another clue, another lead, another deployment.

But when Zolf poked his head into Wilde's office, he saw the agent not at his desk, but standing beside the window, staring down into the lane below.

"Alright, Oscar?"

The man only hummed in response.

Zolf entered the room and closed the door quietly behind him. The low click of the latch felt loud as a thundercrack in the silence.

Wilde didn't look at him.

"I, ah, didn’t see you for lunch."

"No," was the only reply he received.

Zolf crossed his arms over his soft linen shirt and leaned back against the door. "Why not?"

"Didn't... didn't see the point. I was... working."

Wilde had still not looked at him, but Zolf could see that he was turning something in his hands, slowly, carefully. He could catch only glimpses of it between the bard's lithe fingers, but he could guess what it was.

A coin. The one that had been handed to him as proof of loyalty. The one that had passed from the compromised agent's hands to Wilde's, just minutes before the knife had flashed between them.

Zolf guessed it was some kind of signal, some old, coded message known only to the meritocratic agents trusted with its meaning. But he was not one of them and could only wonder at why that was the way of it.

"You need to keep your strength up," Zolf said, and pushed himself off the door. He walked over to Wilde, slowly, carrying himself as though the motion was casual and not measured as carefully as a tailor's work. "There's still some stew out in the kitchen. You should come down with me."

There was no sign in Wilde's face that he had heard Zolf's words, or that he had noted the dwarf moving closer to him. He didn't even flinch when Zolf reached out and placed a hand over his, stopping the ceaseless movement of the coin between his fingers.

Wilde’s eyes flicked down to their hands, to Zolf, and then back out the window.

Nothing. No sign of the bard that he knew. No jibe about holding hands or com _ing_ with Zolf. Nothing about whether there would be meat involved or anything similar—Zolf had heard them all before.

He never thought he would miss the puns or innuendos.

"Oscar."

No reply.

" _Oscar_ ," he said more forcefully.

This time, Wilde turned his head and looked at him, frowning. The frown was wrong. Wilde moved only his eyebrows, forehead creasing. His mouth stayed slack, uncooperative with the rest of his expression. "What is it?"

"Come with me." Zolf's fingers curled around one of Wilde's hands and he began to pull him away from the window.

"I'm—"

"No. No, don't you say you're busy and don’t say you’re _fine_. We both know it's a lie. Come on, I need to show you something."

Zolf pulled Wilde along and tried not to be unnerved by the lack of effort it took. The man followed along without protest, even as Zolf bypassed the stairs in favor of taking him along the corridor to their rooms. He didn't even comment when Zolf opened the first door on the right, the cleric's bedroom, and pulled him in.

Zolf pointed at the bed and said, "Sit."

Wilde sat. There were traces of bemusement on his face, the slightest quirk of his mouth that reminded Zolf of the old Wilde, but they were traces, nothing more.

Zolf stood in front of Wilde and was suddenly uncertain. He hadn't been entirely sure what he was going to do when he got Wilde here, just knew that something needed to change and it wasn't going to happen in Wilde's office. Wilde's office where he was agent and handler and expected to be the pillar of the mission. Wilde's office where he had accepted Barnes' brief on the meritocratic agent they were going to meet. Wilde's office where he had spent days alone after the attack, probably flipping that cursed coin in his fingers for hours on end.

Zolf felt the ugly mass of twisted emotion in his stomach like a cancer. The tangled frustration and uncertainty and wild _need_ to help the man in front of him. To explain to him how it wasn't his fault, how it wasn't any of their faults, how it was a fucked up and difficult situation that they shouldn't—

"I knew him, you know."

Zolf startled at the words, some of the first that Wilde had volunteered on his own. "Sorry?"

"The corrupted agent," Wilde said, staring down at his hands where he still held the coin. "Before... Before everything. I knew him. We weren't _friends_ by any stroke of the word, but there was a professional respect there. I... I was fond of him. We'd worked together."

"You still couldn't have known—"

Wilde's eyes snapped upward and he caught Zolf's gaze, an intensity behind his eyes that hadn't been there before. "I know that, Zolf. I know that our enemy is a master of manipulation and deceit. As much as I would love to blame myself for what happened, we are in the business of espionage and misinformation. It was only a matter of time before that came full circle."

"Then why are you—why have you gone... What's wrong, then, Oscar?"

Zolf waited for an answer for several long seconds, but Wilde only looked back down at his hands and turned the coin.

"Damnit, Oscar!" Zolf reached forward and snatched the coin out of his hands, throwing it to the floor behind him. "Talk to me. I need to know what's wrong so I can help, so I can—"

"So you can fix this?" Wilde was still staring down at his hands, palms up and open before him. They trembled slightly, the shake that he never let out in public, that he never revealed to anyone. "So you can tell me that I couldn't have known? Couldn't have done anything different in the moment? I _know_ that, Zolf. Haven't you been listening? I know that Anders wasn't himself. He seemed exactly the same, but he wasn't. I don't..."

A pause.

"Tell me, Oscar."

"Whatever happened to Anders," Wilde said, slowly, tasting the words as he spoke them, "I don't believe it was his fault. Anyone can be taken. Anyone can be broken. The... difficulty of it isn't forgiving the man I knew for a perceived fault. The... the difficulty is feeling anything but the inevitability of this whole thing. Whatever we're facing Zolf, it's beyond anything I've even known before. I am a good agent. I've been doing this for many years. But I have never faced anything like this. I don't... I don't know why it took _this_ , of all things, to show me that I am wildly out of my depth. But I am. I do not have the resources or the support I once had. I am grateful for—proud, even, of the team we have created. But..." And here, Wilde looked up at Zolf and for the first time, Zolf saw beyond the blank stare, beyond the question and the _whatever_ it was that had been troubling Wilde. He saw the fear. He saw the uncertainty and the sheer, unmitigated terror of what Wilde was feeling. "I don't know how we can win, Zolf. I feel like we're fighting an uphill battle and the only thing waiting for us at the top is the view of another hill, another climb more treacherous than the first. I'm one man. I'm one man with rapidly dwindling assets and a mask of confidence that grows more cracked by the day."

Zolf watched as one of Wilde's shaking hands rose to his cheek and touched the shiny red scar there.

His heart ached.

"Insides showing on the outside," Wilde said, a self-deprecating smile stretching the scar.

Without thinking, Zolf dropped to his knees before Wilde and pulled his hands into his own. "No."

An expression of surprised passed briefly across Wilde's face as Zolf did this, but he said nothing.

"No," Zolf said again, more emphatically this time. " _No_."

He squeezed the hands between his own and shook his head. He could feel them trembling, could feel the way Wilde tensed and tried to keep them still, could _see_ how hard he was trying not to break, trying to keep that cracked—he wanted to yell at the idea of it—mask in place.

"You aren't a machine, Oscar. You don't need to... to hide behind an artificial facade. You _don't_ ," he insisted as a sneer started to curl the corner of Wilde's mouth. "You might have been my handler once upon a time, but you're more than that now. You're my friend, you're one of the people I trust the most in the world. You work harder than any of us. You work your arse off in comparison to the rest of us. Don't you dare say that it's not enough. It will be."

Wilde opened his mouth, clearly about to argue but Zolf shook his head furiously.

"No, Oscar Wilde. No talking. For once, just listen to me."

Whether it was the fierce emotion in his voice or the rare insistence, Wilde stopped talking.

Zolf raised a hand to Wilde's face and gently touched the scar there, as he had so many times before during the numerous healing sessions it had taken to even get it to this point. "This is not an imperfection. This is not... not a manifestation of what you can and cannot do. This is just a way the world has of showing us that the past is the past. It leaves a mark, but you can move past. You can heal. And you can _hope_ , Oscar. You think I don't know how hard that is? Every moment of the day I feel like I'm carrying the weight of the world on my back. But I keep going. I push through it, no matter how hard it is. And part of the reason I can do that is _you_."

Wilde's eyes widened and if Zolf didn't know any better, he could have sworn the man leaned into his hand just a little bit.

"You are the backbone of this team. I don't care what anyone else thinks, you're the lynchpin that keeps us all together. _You_ are the one that gives us hope in the hardest times, when the worst things happen. Barnes is a fucking mess right now, have you noticed? He hasn't done more than pick at his food for days—remind you of anyone? But every time he sees you down in the kitchen or at meals, he tries a little harder. Carter? Carter's been beating himself up almost worse than Barnes. For a guy who tries to seem like he doesn't care, have you noticed the amount of time he puts into studying every single one of your briefs? Have you noticed the way he drops in little details whenever he's talking about what's going to happen? I didn't notice at first. I didn't think anything of it, but once I did it was impossible to miss. He thinks the world of you. He _knows_ that every word you say or write is a matter of life and death and he takes that more seriously than I've seen him do with anything else. You _matter_ , Oscar. And even if you think it's a mask, think this confidence of yours is fake, put on, whatever you want to call it, that doesn't... that doesn't matter, you hear? Because we see it and we know that even if you're hiding the fear from us—no don't give me that look, we're all scared—even if you're hiding the fear from us, you are pushing on. You are climbing that hill step by step, you are fighting the battle because you _know_ that it's the right thing to do."

Here, Zolf paused, trying to read the battle of emotions on Wilde's face, trying to see which way the fight was leaning.

A tear slid down the man's face and Zolf lifted his other hand to wipe it away.

"Hey. Where do you think I get all this hope from, eh? Where do you think I get the strength to keep moving? To keep swinging? To keep caring for you idiots even after Carter has nicked my razor or Barnes has beaten me in the sparring yards for the eightieth time this week? That's you, Oscar. And even when you can't keep _this_ — Zolf pressed his thumbs softly into Wilde's cheekbones, swiping them back toward his temples, "—keep this in place, I know that the man underneath it is fighting harder than any of us. You don't need to be faultless, Oscar. You don't need to be perfect. You just need to trust in us. Trust in us to carry as much of the burden as we can.

"Oscar. I am a cleric of Hope. I have Hoped so hard that we can fix the world, that we can save the people in it, that this isn't all just a _lost cause_ that I have magic equal to that of a God's gift. Literally! Anything that Poseidon could have given me, I still have. And _you_ are the one who got me there. You are the one who has inspired me this entire time. To _do_ better. To _be_ better. No matter what you think of yourself, this is what I think of you. This is what you have managed, even with the doubt and the uphill battle and the pain under that mask—or whatever you want to call it. You have done this. You have given me more hope than anything else in this fucked up, miserable world. Do you understand that? Do you hear me?"

But Wilde was just staring at Zolf, lips slightly parted, wordless. And it wasn't just the "no talking" rule still in effect. It was the words that had come after. It was the fierce protectiveness in Zolf's voice and the fire in his eyes as he spoke.

"I need you to understand this, Oscar. Even if you don't believe it, believe in me. Believe in that Hope. Believe we can do this. Because we _can_."

And like a levy breaking, Wilde's face crumpled. The expressionless cast that had replaced everything that was Oscar Wilde, everything that was the smooth, bright-eyed, confident arsehole of a man, the one that Zolf had followed into this miserable battle of wills and wiles and blue-veined terror--that cast broke. He leaned forward into the support of Zolf's hands, rough with years of callus from sailing, from fighting, from working in the kitchen, and he cried. He slid down to the floor where Zolf knelt and he cried.

And Zolf held him.

He watched the glacier ice of Wilde's numb composure break apart and melt.

And he held him.

He supported the weight of his man, this Atlas with the world on his shoulders.

And he Hoped.

And for once, Zolf thinks he might believe in himself as well.


End file.
